April 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 81IN BRIEF
Loath to Print: The Reluctant
Scientific Author, 1500–1750
by Nicole Howard.
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022 ($55)The arrival of the printing press was
a complicated milestone for scientific
communication. Wary of intellectual-
property theft, information overload
and underprepared readers (Des-
cartes decried “the cavils of ignorant contradiction-
mon gers”), early scientists sought to embrace
print’s possibilities while avoiding its pitfalls: Huy-
gens published his discovery of Saturn’s rings in an
anagram; Galileo strategically distributed review
copies of his work, elevating him to Medici court
mathematician. History professor Nicole Howard’s
analysis offers startling glimpses behind the scenes
of foundational scientific texts. — Dana DunhamLife on the Rocks:
Building a Future for Coral Reefs
by Juli Berwald. Riverhead Books, 2022 ($28)Ocean scientist Juli Berwald is ada-
mant that Life on the Rocks is not an
obituary. The threats to coral reefs are
daunting and multilayered, but so, too,
are the solutions. Berwald goes be -
yond the usual methods (preservation, reef-safe
sunscreen) to describe unlikely efforts by special-
ops veterans turned reef doctors, marine scientists
and a conglomerate candy company. One idea in -
volves nebulizing seawater into clouds over reefs to
reflect more of the sun’s radiation. Each highly read-
able chapter leans toward optimism, but key ques-
tions go unresolved. Are corals resilient enough to
withstand warming oceans, or are these “success
stories” death rattles in disguise? — Maddie BenderThe Candy House
by Jennifer Egan.
Scribner, 2022 ($28)
Like its prequel, the 2011 Pulitzer-win-
ning A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jenni-
fer Egan’s newest book reads not quite
like a novel or a short story collection
but like a fragmentary work of fiction
with many perspectives and styles. This time a tech-
nology called Own Your Unconscious—a headset
that lets people revisit their memories or see some-
one else’s—is the conceit that brings old and new
characters together in New York, Chicago, the Amer-
ican Southwest, and elsewhere as they navigate grief,
love, parenthood, sex, addiction and trauma. Funny,
heartfelt and cerebral, The Candy House asks compel-
ling questions about authenticity and privacy in the
era of surveillance capitalism. — Adam Morgan
this new crop of books are little more than scenery,
a kind of wry nod to the low-grade fear many of us
have that maybe this is just what the future will look
like: one vicious contagion after another. Some times
they are a means to critique the maddening vulner-
ability of individual-centric societies struggling
against calamities that require, more than anything,
a communal response. In stories such as Lawrence
Wright’s T he End of October, they are action-movie
fodder: pathogens cast in the role of supervillains.
Mandel’s work occupies the decidedly intro-
spective end of this spectrum. As with her previous
novels, there is no hard sci-fi in Sea of Tranquility, no
detailed explanations of the biomechanics of disease
or the physics of time travel. Occasionally a tracking
device might make an appearance out of narrative
necessity, or a character may briefly note the rules
of the game before slipping through time, but all
these descriptions are firmly subservient. It is the
emotional and psychological consequences of these
technologies and calamities with which the novel is
chiefly concerned. When Olive sits on an airship
with three masks over her face, terrified of bringing
a new illness home to her husband and daughter, it
is only tangential that the airship is traveling to the
moon. When she trudges through yet another
virtual lecture to a room full of holograms, every
reader will be reminded of their last Zoom meeting
and the vaguely dehumanizing sense of being ush-
ered into a cheap facsimile of the world.
Many of Mandel’s signature moves are here:
the interweaving plotlines, the quietly dystopian
setting and, of course, the deadly pandemic as
narrative device. But perhaps more than all these
things, the most common and powerful motif in
Mandel’s fiction is the adherence to the idea thatart and beauty are necessary. Her characters
might suffer from a great many maladies but none
more soul-draining than aesthetic poverty, none
more unendurable than grayscale lives.
Art seeps in through every seam of this story.
As soon as Edwin arrives in Canada, he takes up
painting classes. Violin notes echo through the
centuries, as do the words of a novel within the
novel. The work of Shakespeare makes a cameo,
as it has before in Mandel’s books. Art is the
means by which characters decipher the secrets
of their own existence, in some parts of the novel
quite literally.
Perhaps this is why Sea of Tranquility, for all
its narrative cleverness and sci-fi inventions, is
at its core an emotionally devastating novel abouthuman connection: what we are to one another—
and what we should be.
Midway through the book a pandemic tears
through the population, both on Earth and in the
distant colonies, and several of Mandel’s characters
are forced into numbingly inward lives as depleted
and fear-lacquered as so many of ours these past
couple of years. It is the small details of this self-
imposed cocooning, these hollowed-out moments,
that cut deepest. The novel’s most crushing scene,
only a few lines long and told in passing, involves
a young child deep into pandemic lockdown having
a conversation with an inanimate object, trying to
make friends. I have loved every one of Mandel’s
books (full disclosure: she was kind enough to blurb
my first novel), but none has hit a nerve quite the
way this one did.
Despite this heaviness, Sea of Tranquility is
a brisk read. At a line level, the verbs do much of
the heavy lifting, and the overarching plot, which
involves a vast time-travel bureaucracy, is deli-
ciously and just a little disconcertingly addictive.
There is constant movement both within scenes
and in the grand sweep of the novel. As the pan-
demic rages still through the real world, some
of the scenes will feel a little too close. But after
so much time spent away from one another,
after so much distancing, the closeness is in its
own way a balm, a reminder that we were, even
in our aloneness, together.Omar El Akkad is a Canadian-Egyptian journalist
and author of the novels What Strange Paradise
(2021) and American War (2017).Emily St. John Mandel’s characters might
suffer from a great many maladies but none
more unendurable than grayscale lives.